Of course, the British were wrong to believe this was the decisive turning point in World War II—there were, as we are incessantly reminded, far bigger battles on the Eastern Front. But it was pretty decisive for Britain: the loss (or, politically even more awkward, capture) of the 200,000-plus U.K. troops retrieved from the beaches after being cut off by the German panzers would have been devastating, perhaps fatal, for a country that could field only ten infantry divisions in 1939. As it was, casualties were very heavy—one of many arresting points made by Dunkirk is how terrifyingly quickly combat-damaged ships can sink.

Moreover, Dunkirk was in a real sense a people’s battle. Some 700 civilian craft were recruited to get the men off the beaches and (as the movie recounts) their owners sometimes went with them. When my father took charge of the municipal-socialist public transport operation in Birkenhead in the 1960s, he had Mersey ferrymen who had gone. It was an intense popular effort and it struck deep personal roots.

Although aimed at a mass audience, Dunkirk is a very sophisticated movie and a remarkable technical achievement by writer-producer director Christopher Nolan. It’s also a political achievement. Nolan’s subject is one of the Anglosphere’s great patriotic epics and thus ripe for anti-West snark, but it has actually been well received by the Leftist cultural Establishment e.g.

Nolan seems to have flown under the radar, partly by eliminating virtually all dialog and hence minimizing the chance of jarring Politically Correct sensibilities.

Even Churchill’s sacralized “We shall fight on the beaches” June 4 oration announcing the evacuation to the House of Commons, hearing which was so much an inescapable part of growing up in England in the 1950s, like listening to Kathleen Ferrier, that I could recite it from memory and never without a thrill, appears here only as haltingly read, from a newspaper, by an exhausted, wondering survivor as his train finally reaches London.

But Nolan’s achievement goes far beyond avoiding trouble. Quietly, possibly inadvertently, he has made a movie that celebrates national identity.

But the British army in Nolan’s Dunkirk is totally, completely and stunningly white.

(One of the “couple of women,” a nurse, is unsparingly shown, in a horrible below-decks underwater shot, dying an Equal Opportunity death by drowning after her hospital ship is torpedoed. Is this an implicit criticism of putting women in the front line?)

The result of this homogeneity, as the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass wrote in a brilliant column:

The star of “Dunkirk” is the character of the British people at that time, in the worst days of the war, long before America joined in, when the British Expeditionary Force was humiliated in Europe and almost destroyed.

And so it is a movie about a people of a certain time, a people who knew who they were, a people who firmly understood their culture and their obligations to it, and to their nation, and to each other.

I am old enough to remember that Britain. And it looks like Christopher Nolan, born in 1970 in London to a British father and an American mother, caught some sense of it too.

One small sign: Nolan has the British troops standing in orderly, quiet queues (= lines in American), waiting to be taken off. This is apparently what happened at Dunkirk. The British of that era were very good at queuing. Significantly, the working class was best at it. It used to irritate my father that everyone would queue for his buses except in affluent areas, where people would just stand around and block the pavement (=sidewalk in American). “They think they’re too good to queue,” he said. Social rot in Britain started from the top.

(Nolan also has his troops being handed slices of bread and jam by rescue workers. Known in the North of England as “jam butties,” these were also omnipresent when I was a child. Reportedly, they’ve died out, along with so much else).

In 1940, my father, already in the British Army in which he was to spend 6½ years, was stationed on the English Channel at Folkstone, looking right at Dunkirk. Years later, reading about the German plans for Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of England, I realized he was right where paratroopers were to land and asked him what kind of resistance his unit would have been able to mount.